Miyamoto’s Possible Move to Homogenize the Mario Brothers

Paper Mario: StickerStar was met with rather mixed results all around: some took well to the new direction, while many older fans of the series that began as an experiment on the Nintendo 64 will assert that a lot has been lost over the course of the years. As though to shed new light on the dispute, an interview was conducted not too long ago with the team who started the Paper Mario series; while a bulk of the interview is about the history of the individuals and their careers, it does reveal a few odd brushes the team had with Shigeru Miyamoto during development.

When asked about how the game itself would contribute to the unique voice the series has added to the Mario universe in the past, Kensuke Tanabe had this to say:

Shigeru Miyamoto, rather pleased with himself.

Through the inclusion of this story and the characters we wrote to fit that story, we ended up giving the game a unique character. However, for Sticker Star, Mr Miyamoto asked us to create a game using only characters already found in the Mario world rather and not any of our own. So instead of focusing our attention on the story or characters we focused instead on paper.

In a different interview, it was stated that Miyamoto had ‘persevered’ with development; when asked what exactly it was that Miyamoto was so particular about, Tanabe answered:

Aside from wanting us to change the atmosphere a lot, there were two main things that Miyamoto-san said from the start of the project-“It’s fine without a story, so do we really need one?” and “As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world.“

And as gaming aficionados Arin Hanson & Jon Jafari pointed out, whilst playing through The new Super Mario Bros Wii together, many iotas of evidence that the games have become somewhat homogenized, despite being called ‘New’. That is, almost all content of these new games have been taken directly from a select few, popular titles on older consoles, with a very small amount of original content added. This assertion remains largely true when applied to The new Supper Mario Bros, The new Super Mario Bros Wii, The new Super Mario Bros 2, The new Super Mario Bros 2 (3DS), and more recently: The new Super Mario Bros Wii U.

We’re scared too.

One of the Nintendo GameCube’s greatest titles, Luigi’s Mansion, is also receiving a much-anticipated sequel soon. Though now considered a treasure by its cult following, with new copies fetching 130 USD (150 for Japanese copies), at the time, the game received much disapproval by fans for not being enough like the other Mario games. Flash forward to now, when Luigi’s mansion: Dark Moon for the 3DS appears to feature a far more side-scrolling, linear, stage-based format–more akin to (you guessed it) the older Mario titles.

Even in Super Mario Galaxy 2, the game opens with Mario shouting ‘Super Marioooo Galaxyyyyyy’ as though he knew the game was trying not to stray too far from the formula of the previous one.

It may simply be old age and a desire to reconnect with his youthful successes in the gaming industry, or submission to a fear of making ‘unsafe’ games that are not guaranteed to sell, but Shigeru Miyamoto has possibly lost his creative edge, and now seems to be imposing it on all his subsidiary developers. The evidence is astounding, to an extent, though we can still hope he retires soon and the many series tied to the brothers can diverge once more.